13 Apr Maureen’s spiteful goodbye: Feedback

About my reaction to Maureen MacDonald’s retirement announcement, longtime New Democrat Mike Coyle writes:

Seriously, Parker, sometimes a personal announcement is just a personal announcement. As I understand your analysis, Maureen’s announcement was “spiteful” because she didn’t use the occasion of her own retirement from public life to send special kudos to the new leader (or any leader, for that matter) and she didn’t use the chance provided by her personal announcement to heap best future wishes on the party for which she worked her guts out for the past 32 years. (She first ran in 1984).

It is the party who should, and undoubted will, be toasting her, not the other way around. And when, during the course of your long and often insightful observation of Nova Scotia politics, has any other MLA retired for health reasons and used that occasion to make a partisan political statement of the kind you seem to imagine that Maureen was being “spiteful” and “self-indulgent” for not having made?

You know, you could be right about Kyle Buott’s dim prospects as a Communications Director, but the evidence does not persuade me that you would fare much better in the communications department yourself, sir.